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Friday, March 09, 2018

`Feel the Loss of Much of Our Sun'

“The old
downgrading of Boswell was accompanied by a downgrading of his friendship with
Johnson. He was seen as a kind of remora fish attached by the suckers of
flattery to a leviathan, occasionally brushed off by the impatient monster of
the deep, though more often tolerated, at times half affectionately, but
certainly never loved or even much respected.”

That’s the libelous
party line, codified at least since 1831 when Macaulay reviewed John Croker’s edition
of Boswell’s Life of Johnson and
concluded it was “immoral” that so great a book should be authored by such “a
great fool.” For Macaulay, Boswell was an idiot savant of literature, a whoring
drunk and moral leper who inexplicably turned himself into a writer of genius.
Macaulay’s censure postponed a proper assessment of Boswell’s achievement for
more than a century. In his review of the same edition, Carlyle was less
dismissive than Macaulay but unleashed an even more colorful cataract of venom
at Boswell the man: “. . . he was vain, heedless, a babbler; had much of the
sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio; curiously spiced too with an
all-pervading dash of the coxcomb.” No one is as entertainingly vituperative as
Carlyle when he’s in a snit, as when he itemizes Boswell’s “bag-cheeks, hanging
like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more [and] that coarsely-protruded
shelf-mouth, that fat dew-lapped chin.” He tops it off by finding Boswell guilty
of “sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility.”

The
discovery of Boswell’s journals in the 1920s and 1930s, and the publication of
the London Journal 1762-1763 in 1950,
followed by subsequent volumes in the series, sparked an ongoing reassessment.
In A Life of James Boswell (1999),
Peter Martin writes:

“At first,
the journals appeared to confirm the nineteenth-century perception of Boswell
as a compulsive womanizer, drinker and gambler, a habitual gallant who only
seemed happy when acting the fool. But readers soon began to see him as a
highly complex figure, someone they thought they understood and with whom they
were prepared to travel the extra mile. His honesty, sincerity, geniality,
sensitivity, and desire to become a better human being are partly responsible
for this change of perception. His journals also show him to be a conscientious
and talented writer. Perhaps most importantly, they reveal the degree of mental
suffering he endured for most of his lifetime.”

The witty remora
metaphor at the top is the work of the late Louis Auchincloss in Love without Wings: Some Friendships in Literature
and Politics (1991). Auchincloss argues that while Boswell and Johnson each
“used” the other and that both possessed “greatly developed egos,” a deep and
mutually gratifying friendship evolved between them. It was “very probably the deepest
to which either was ever a partner.”

Auchincloss
is serious about friendship, suggesting we have customarily treated it with
less attentiveness and care than other relationships. “Most of us spend a large
part of our lives in the company of friends and would feel the loss of much of
our sun without them,” he writes in his preface, adding: “There is no commandment
in the Decalogue to honor a friend.” Through the lens of friendship,
Auchincloss looks at something even larger: what it means to be human. He explores
fifteen friendships, including Henry Adams and John Hay, Ivy Compton-Burnett
and Margaret Jourdain, Edith Wharton and Margaret Chanler, Arthur Hallam and
Lord Tennyson. As a novelist, he is intrigued by the subject, its stickiness, contradictions
and deep satisfactions. In passing, Auchincloss makes shrewd observations about
writing, his subjects and human nature in general. He’s very good on
Compton-Burnett, a novelist I’ve often lobbied for but never with success:

“She was not
much impressed by human love or even by human hate, both of which she probably
felt had been overrated by artists through the ages. In her view we differ from
beasts essentially in two respects: in our speech and in our striving for
power, and to these her novels are largely addressed. Her characters are locked
in constant conflict as to who shall rule the home, and they express their
arguments in the concise and limpid prose of La Rochefoucauld.”